


In Death, Sacrifice

by greyvvardenfell



Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Angst and Tragedy, F/M, Gen, i'm so sorry zev
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-05
Updated: 2017-05-05
Packaged: 2018-10-27 18:43:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10814586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greyvvardenfell/pseuds/greyvvardenfell
Summary: Allari Surana knew it would end like this before Riordan even told her, but that doesn't make it any easier.





	In Death, Sacrifice

Sweat beaded across her forehead and dripped down her temples. Her tousled hair had slipped free of its bands and lay slicked across her skin like the waves of the sea. Her eyes, dark and narrow, were set with concentration, a decision she had consciously made to prevent herself from turning away from her destiny. She knew, as she had always known, that she would not walk away from this fight.

The Archdemon screamed its pain into the clouding sky, its hide prickled with arrows and streaming blood from its many slash wounds. It would not be long now. Allari gripped her sword in her right hand and felt electricity crackle between the fingers of her left. She took a step towards the dying Old God. She did not look around. Her vision began to tunnel, fraying into darkness as she moved. She took another step, the fatigue in her lean muscles preventing her from moving any faster.

An armored hand touched her shoulder. Snarling, she turned, sword already raised, to beat away the darkspawn. She had thought they were all dead. Instead, a young man’s face, with eyes wide and blond stubble spattered with gore, melted into her vision. Alistair.

“Lari, wait,” he began.

“Please don’t,” she growled, her voice thick. “Don’t try to stop me. I’ve known…” Lari looked away from his gaze. She swallowed hard. “I’ve known for a while that I need to do this. Since before Riordan even said anything.”

“What?” Alistair’s brow creased. “How could you have?”

“I saw it in a dream. About a month ago, right before the Landsmeet started.” Lari felt tears prick at the backs of her eyes. She hated crying.

Alistair had started to say something else, but she cut him off. If she didn’t do it now, he would end up talking her out of it.

“Ferelden needs you, Alistair, more than it could ever need me. You’re Maric’s son, a Theirin. And I… I’m just…”

“You’re a Grey Warden, and a damn good one,” Alistair cut her off, with more ferocity in his voice than she had ever heard. “You’re a friend. I can’t let you do this.”

Lari couldn’t look at him. She clenched her knuckles around the hilt of her sword and felt the energy of her mana pulse where her fingers touched the blade. “It’s not up to you,” she said softly. “It never was.” She turned to the towering Archdemon, surrounded by templars keeping it occupied in its dying throes. She took another step towards it, meaning to brush past her fellow Warden.

The young king tightened his jaw and refused to step aside. “And what about Zev–”

“Don’t!” Lari’s snarl made Alistair startle. She stopped in her tracks, barely a foot from him, and whipped around to face him. “Don’t you think I haven’t considered what it would do to him? Don’t you think I haven’t gone over and over it in my head all this time? Do you really believe I would tear him apart like this if I thought there was any other choice?” Her tears spilled over onto her bronze cheeks, already flushed from the fighting and turning redder as she cried. She couldn’t bear to look around for the assassin who had stolen her heart. She knew she wouldn’t have the strength to do what she had to do if she saw him looking back at her. She tried to swallow her sobs. “I love him. I need him and maybe he needs me too. But the country needs you, and it’s got to be one of us. Please… please let it be me.”

Alistair looked down at Lari. He saw the pain in her eyes, the horrific weight of the choice Wynne had warned her about pressing her shoulders down. _Death and duty may part you._ He wouldn’t have wished it on anyone, least of all the elven mage who had become the sister he always wanted. He knew there was nothing he could do or say that would make her change her mind, short of knocking her out and taking the Archdemon’s life himself. But she was right: this went beyond them both, and those they loved. He was to be king. He had never wanted it, especially not built upon the fallen bodies of his friends and companions, but the reality loomed, heedless of what he or she or any of them wanted. Alistair felt tears well in his own eyes. He reached out again and pulled Lari into a clashing, clumsy embrace. 

“It has been an honor to fight with you, my sister,” he said, his voice trembling.

“And you, brother,” Lari answered as she pulled away, her voice tight. She rubbed tears from her cheek with the back of her hand and squared her slight shoulders. “Thank you, Alistair. Take care of…” she paused, squeezed her eyes shut briefly, and opened them again. “Take care of him. When I can’t.” She spoke in a jagged whisper and turned to face the end.

——

Zevran tugged his dagger from the chest of a dead hurlock, its greasy blood already congealing along the blade. He swore and looked around for something to scrub it off, but saw only hardened leather and equally dirty burlap. He sighed shortly and rolled his shoulders, tired but willing to carry on the fight. He hadn’t seen Lari for several minutes; he had tried hard to stay close to her in the fray, but they had been separated by the last wave of darkspawn. He looked around again, this time for more of the creatures. He saw none. Instead of relief, a dark, flickering dread kindled in his heart. His cocky half-smile faltered. He sheathed his weapons in one fluid motion and broke into a run, searching desperately among the corpses of man and darkspawn for Lari.

A terrible roar crashed over him as he rounded a corner. The Archdemon loomed ahead, powerful and huge even as it neared death. Zevran saw templars, normally so imposing in their massive silverite armor, scuttle away from the dragon’s twisting and stomping. He redoubled his pace. Something was happening.

Suddenly, the Archdemon stopped thrashing. The templars around it backed away as a small figure began to approach, a single sword its only weapon. Wait, no, Zevran noticed. Lightning crackled in arcing lines from it too. _Lari._

Too late he sprinted at the dragon, her name searing his throat. Too late he neared, just close enough to see his love leap onto the demon’s head as it bared its overgrown fangs in her face. Too late he skidded to a halt, close enough to see it all but too far to stop her. She took the sword in both hands, hands that had touched him too little, and sent trailing tendrils of electric power streaming down it into the dragon’s skull. He screamed for her again, his blood pounding in his ears and his fear catching in his throat. She was screaming too, too close and too far and too loud to hear him. The dying Archdemon added its voice, shaking the ground and knocking Zevran to his knees. A wound on his forehead reopened in the blast and blood trickled into his eye. He did nothing to stop it.

A new note entered Lari’s voice, a pain beyond words as the soul of the Archdemon began to tear her apart. Zevran, as if from another plane of existence, saw her strain at the sword now stabbing into the top of the dragon’s head, though whether she was pushing it further in or trying to rip it out, he couldn’t tell. The ringing in his ears from all the noise made everything seem far away and he struggled to stay conscious in the wake of it.

With horror, he watched. He could do nothing but watch. He blinked blood from his eyes only to regret missing the instant he could have used to see Lari once more. He was frozen, on his knees, too close and too far and too late and too little. He watched as the energy of the Archdemon ebbed away, overflowing into the body of the elven mage atop it, a body that was too slight and too small to contain it all. He screamed for her, called for her, chanted her name and whispered it as Allari Surana, his Lari, recoiled from the weapon. The dragon demon’s grotesque body shattered into light and, with eerie grace, a body fell to the cold stone, empty.

For a moment, all was still. Zevran Arainai, too slow, too late, dragged himself to his feet. He moved as if in a trance towards where the Archdemon had disappeared. Another form, clad in shining golden plate, approached as well, from the opposite side of the tower’s ring of crenellations. Zevran did not see it. He didn’t see anything but the crumpled, silent, broken body prone on the ground before him. He staggered to it. He knelt. He touched its hand, a hand mottled with tiny bruises from the inside. He remembered, as if from hundreds of years ago, being told that magic caused bruises like that if the user pushed too hard. She had told him that, as they lay together in the firelight. He touched its hair, her hair, still damp with sweat. He touched her face, her lips, her pointed ears and straight brows. He let hot tears and his own blood drip from him onto her coppery brown skin and wiped each drop away with his gloved thumb until another hand, less familiar, clasped his shoulder. He did not look up. He did not sob or scream or curse the Maker. He did not care who heard him now as he repeated over and over, in a whisper, to the body of the woman who could no longer hear him, “I love you.”

**Author's Note:**

> Allari isn't my canon Warden (mostly because I couldn't bear to hurt Zev like this and live with the fallout...) but I will be writing some other things in her world. 
> 
> Also this is the first fic I've written in like 7 years so yay?


End file.
